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New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages

New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages

GENERAL INFORMATION

Date of the Seminar: 25-27 September 2017, Wrocław, Poland

Our conference seeks to confront the discourse of affective mobilization propagating anti-EU and anti-immigration policies in many European countries, with its opponent, the discourse of civic ethos and cosmopolitanism. How did it happen that xenophobia and anti-European sentiment have become a vocal presence in public discourse? We hope that the conference will shed some light on how a refurbished nationalism has become central to the new visions of what has become a functioning oxymoron in Central Europe: the non-liberal democracy.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

The historical perspective seeks to answer the questions about how the new nationalisms build on the past, asking for instance:

How do they use the past to build a new model of national identity as part of a strictly defined and exclusionary ethnos?

How do they formulate the concept of a historically rooted national subject?

What historical narratives do they turn into (new) national myths?

What historiographic models and historical research can be deployed to challenge the appropriation of history by nationalist politics?

Chantal Mouffe claims in her Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (2013) that the European transnational integrative project was based on the discourse of rationalization and individualism, thus it positioned national loyalties in the space of a lingering past and premodern tribal affect. The social sciences perspective could tackle this division and put it into a more multi-dimensional perspective, such as:

The division into the EU “integrative project” and its opponent, “national loyalties” may inadvertently empower ethnic/exclusionary nationalism as the only viable politics for fostering national identities;

How does mass migration influence the sense of identity, locatedness, and belonging? How does it happen that migrants are often lured into nationalist sentiments?

How do contemporary mediascapes, including social media, influence identity formations and give individuals a sense of political agency?

In what sense is postcommunist nostalgia a factor in attracting supporters of nationalist sentiment?

In what sense does the current turn to nationalism look like a haunted revolution? What prior appeals to the will of the sovereign as supreme political agency does it echo?

In majoritarian discourse – the one that claims legitimacy, on the basis of representing the majority – national identity may turn into what Arjun Appadurai calls “predatory identities”. What are the mechanisms that trigger this transformation?

How does nationalist discourse react to the emergence of new nations (Silesians, for example), and how are national identities constructed beyond the reach of nationalism?

The linguisticperspective invites a reflection on the formation, alliances and porousness of discourses, an investigation of imaginaries and conceptualizations of belonging in culture, the affect in language and politics, the language of dichotomous divisions vs. the language of linking etc. The questions to cover would be, among others:

How and in what circumstances are the languages of emergency, nationalist discourse being one of them, constructed and deployed?

How are the enemies created (named) and contained? How does it happen that in nationalist discourse the excluded margins are becoming ever broader?

The conference will be held in Wrocław, Poland, 25-27 September 2017. It is a joint venture between the European Academy of Science/Academia Europaea (Knowledge Hub, Wrocław) and the Faculty of Philology of the University of Wrocław. A selection of papers will be published. The conference is part of a series of symposia, which bring together established scholars with early career researchers, particularly from East Central Europe.

USEFUL INFORMATION

THE SEMINAR LANGUAGE will be English.

FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS: The organizers cover the conference fee and the costs of accommodation (up to 4 nights), travel (up to a certain maximum: Western Europe – up to 100 EUR; Central and Eastern Europe – up to 150 EUR) and insurance.

All correspondence must be addressed to: Katarzyna Majkowska (majkowska@acadeuro.wroclaw.pl).

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Hana Cervinkova

University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw

Poland

Hana Cervinkova is the Rector and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Education at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from New School for Social Research in New York in 2004 and her Habilitation degree in Educational Studies at ULS in 2013. She is an author of numerous books and articles on in which she focuses on transformation processes in Central Europe with particular focus on education, memory and urban space. In her current ethnographic research she is interested in school-based civic education in Poland (MCS Horizon 2020 ITN Project).

Cervinkova serves on the board of eight scholarly journals and between 2012 and 2016 she was the member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. She is active in the area of international education programs. In 2016 she received (together with Juliet Golden) the Award for Excellence in Education Abroad Curriculum Design by the Forum on Education Abroad, for the course Negotiating Identities Across Europe’s Borders at Syracuse University and the University of Lower Silesia.

The Nation and the Phantomic Other. Producing Citizenship in the Polish School Curriculum.

This paper is based on the author’s ongoing ethnographic research on citizenship education in Polish schools. It will speak to the ongoing struggle between different conceptions of citizenship (civic vs cultural, global vs. national) that transpire in Polish school practices and curriculum and which rely on competing approaches to history and historical memory. The author is interested in how young people navigate the highly politicised landscapes of citizenship education and imagine themselves as citizens through the historical prism.

Pieter C. Emmer studied History and Economics at the University of Leiden and obtained a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Amsterdam in 1974. Since then he has been teaching at the History Department of the University of Leiden as a Professor in the History of the Expansion of Europe and the related migration movements. He was a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK (1978-1979), at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2000-2001) and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2002-2003), Wassenaar, The Netherlands. He served as Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin (1986-87) and at the University of Hamburg, Germany (1996-97). In 2004 Pieter Emmer was elected an ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

Siegfried Huigen is Professor of Dutch Literature at the University of Wrocław and Visiting Professor of Dutch Literature and Cultural History at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. His research interests are travel writing and the history of colonial science and scholarship. He is the author of De weg naar Monomotapa (The Road to Monomotapa, 1996) and Knowledge and Colonialism; Eighteenth-century Travellers in South Africa (2007 and 2009). He co-edited several books on South African politics of memory and the history of colonial knowledge. In 2013 Siegfried Huigen was elected an ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

Dorota Kołodziejczyk is Director of Postcolonial Studies Center at Institute of English Studies, Wrocław University, co-founder of the international Research Center for Postcolonial and Posttotalitarian Studies, co-founder and board member of research network Postdependence Studies Center. She also taught at SUNY University at Buffalo as the Kosciuszko Foundation visiting scholar 2002-2004. She specializes in postcolonial studies and comparative literature. Author of articles on postcolonial/East-Central European intersections in edited volumes from Routledge, Rodopi, Universitas; co-editor of Historie, społeczeństwa, przestrzenie dialogu: Studia post zależnościowe w perspektywie porównawczej, Universitas 2014, Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe, 2016. Translator and translation editor of postcolonial theory.

Katarzyna Majkowska studied Polish Philology (MA) at the University of Wrocław. She finished Postgraduate Studies in Event Management at the Wrocław School of Banking. Since March 2011 she has been working in Convention Bureau Wrocław, and from December 2011 works at the Academia Europaea Knowledge Hub Wrocław.

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Uwe Backes

University of Dresden

Germany

Uwe Backes is a Professor of Political Science and a Deputy Director at the Hannah Arendt Institute on Totalitarianism Research and teaches Political Science at the University of Dresden, Germany. He studied Political Science, History, and German Language and Literature at the University of Trier, Germany (Ph.D. 1987). Post-Doctoral Dissertation at the University of Bayreuth 1997. He was a Feodor Lynen Grantee of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Centre d’Étude de la Vie Politique Française (CEVIPOF) in Paris (1997/98) und a Heisenberg Grantee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 1998/99. He was a Visiting Professor in Paris-Nanterre, Nancy and Strasbourg (France). Important publications in English: Political Extremes (Routledge, 2010); Right-Wing Extremism in Europe (Ed. with Patrick Moreau, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2012); Ideocracies in Comparison (Ed. with Steffen Kailitz, Routledge, 2016).

Opposite Nationalisms in Europe

There can be no doubt that in the course of the past few decades the chances to realise political attempts at a renationalisation of politics in Europe have become bigger. Obviously, however, this is no coherent movement but a variety of groups pursuing goals which sometimes are almost contradicting. The lecture attempts to work out the variety of different kinds of nationalism, by shedding light on the different basic motifs explaining the attractiveness of these kinds of nationalism. This way also lines of conflict are made visible which separate the various groups from each other and make it difficult for them, if not impossible, to work out any coherent project for the future.

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Hana Cervinkova

University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw

Poland

Hana Cervinkova is the Rector and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Education at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from New School for Social Research in New York in 2004 and her Habilitation degree in Educational Studies at ULS in 2013. She is an author of numerous books and articles on in which she focuses on transformation processes in Central Europe with particular focus on education, memory and urban space. In her current ethnographic research she is interested in school-based civic education in Poland (MCS Horizon 2020 ITN Project).

Cervinkova serves on the board of eight scholarly journals and between 2012 and 2016 she was the member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. She is active in the area of international education programs. In 2016 she received (together with Juliet Golden) the Award for Excellence in Education Abroad Curriculum Design by the Forum on Education Abroad, for the course Negotiating Identities Across Europe’s Borders at Syracuse University and the University of Lower Silesia.

The Nation and the Phantomic Other. Producing Citizenship in the Polish School Curriculum.

This paper is based on the author’s ongoing ethnographic research on citizenship education in Polish schools. It will speak to the ongoing struggle between different conceptions of citizenship (civic vs cultural, global vs. national) that transpire in Polish school practices and curriculum and which rely on competing approaches to history and historical memory. The author is interested in how young people navigate the highly politicised landscapes of citizenship education and imagine themselves as citizens through the historical prism.

The paper will discuss two questions: “Where do the present nations come from and how are they being formed?” (the stated problem implies that we are dealing in Central Europe with the process of nation formation, and that this process is different from previous ones – in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century). As to the question: „Where does the present-day nation come from?”, I answer: from the experience of a lost revolution – the one that began in 1980 in Poland and which allegedly won in 1989. For economic transformation to win, the revolution had to lose. And the main actors of the revolution – i.e. social classes – had to be put to shame. The victorious transformation left behind most of all fears, the lost revolution left behind most of all anger. The nation that emerges after the lost revolution is a response to fear and humiliation. Logically, a nation creates itself as a secure and shame-resistant community. Can the collective be safe today? Can the nation be immune to shame?

Pieter C. Emmer studied History and Economics at the University of Leiden and obtained a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Amsterdam in 1974. Since then he has been teaching at the History Department of the University of Leiden as a Professor in the History of the Expansion of Europe and the related migration movements. He was a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK (1978-1979), at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2000-2001) and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2002-2003), Wassenaar, The Netherlands. He served as Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin (1986-87) and at the University of Hamburg, Germany (1996-97). In 2004 Pieter Emmer was elected an ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

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Thomas Hylland Eriksen

University of Oslo

Norway

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and a research affiliate at Christian Michelsens Institutt (CMI), Bergen. His research has focused on identity politics, globalisation and complex societies, with fieldwork in Mauritius, Trinidad and Norway. Recently, he has carried out research in Australia on the dilemmas of growth and sustainability. His textbooks in anthropology, including Ethnicity and Nationalism, Small Places, Large Issues and What is Anthropology?, have been widely translated. His latest books are Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography (2015) and Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (2016). In 2017, he was awarded the University of Oslo’s Prize for Research.

Fake News and Polarised Identities: The Struggle over Truth in an Overheated World

It is no coincidence that “fake news”, “alternative facts” and the loss of faith in formerly hegemonic knowledge have spread epidemically in the last year or two. To some extent, this is an “overheating effect” resulting from acceleated change in the production of information and widespread difficulties in navigating and negotiating different sources of knowledge. However, the deeper causes of the lost hegemony of scientific and otherwise authoritative knowledge are structural and need to be studied properly by anthropologists. The contestations over knowledge regimes witnessed in many parts of the world are directly connected to polarised identities and the rise of several kinds of populism. These are the issues to be addressed in the lecture, with examples from Europe, America and Australia.

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Viacheslav Morozov

University of Tartu

Estonia

Viacheslav Morozov is Professor of EU–Russia Studies at the University of Tartu and chairs the Council of the UT’s Centre for EU–Russia Studies (CEURUS). Before moving to Estonia in 2010, he had taught for 13 years at the St. Petersburg State University in Russia. His current research explores how Russia’s political and social development has been conditioned by the country’s position in the international system. This approach has been laid out in his most recent monograph Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World (Palgrave, 2015), while the comparative dimension is explored, inter alia, in the edited volume Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony (Ashgate, 2013). He is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia). In 2007–2010, he was a member of the Executive Council of the Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA).

New Nationalisms and Identity Politics: Minorities, Majorities and Universal Emancipation

A defining feature of the new nationalisms, which are the focus of this conference, is the way they are exploiting the regime of truth established in liberal democratic societies. Their use of the language of democracy, human rights and identity is sometimes hard to differentiate from the mainstream convention. In my talk I will concentrate on identity politics, in order to demonstrate that despite being majoritarian in the way it seeks democratic legitimacy, new nationalist discourse always makes use of the rhetoric of minority protection. This is done by presenting the existence of ‘our’ nation as threatened by overwhelming forces of neo-liberal globalisation (embodied in the EU, the West or even in ‘the Washington establishment’). I will argue that there is no way of preventing the language of minority protection from being hijacked by ‘predatory identities’, unless one foregrounds the universal dimension of equality and emancipation, as opposed to rights and entitlements associated with particular identities. The key political question today, as always, consists in how to navigate between totalitarian disregard of the local and the parochialist concentration on the particular.

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Bogdan Stefanescu

University of Bucharest

Romania

Bogdan Ştefănescu, Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, is Professor of English with the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest where he teaches critical theory, British literature, the rhetoric of nationalism, and the comparative study of postcolonialism and postcommunism. He is the author of Patrii din cuvinte (Nations out of Words, 2016), Postcommunism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity (2013), and Romanticism between Forma Mentis and Historical Profile (1999, 2013), co-author of Postcolonialism/Postcommunism. Dictionary of Key Cultural Terms (2011), and co-editor of Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Intersections and Overlaps (2011)—all from Bucharest University Press. He has contributed articles and reviews for Slavic and East European Journal, The Literary Encyclopedia, The James Joyce Literary Supplement (Miami, Fl), The Bloomsbury Review, Krytyka (Kiew), ESSACHESS – Journal for Communication Studies (l’Agence universitaire de la Francophonie/AUF), Miscellanea Posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia (Wroclaw), and chapters in collective volumes from Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), Bloomsbury Publishing, Brill|Rodopi (Amsterdam), University of Krakow Publishers, Aracne Editrice (Rome). His literary translations—mostly from Romanian into English—have appeared in fifteen books from Romanian and US publishers. Prof. Ştefănescu is a founding member of the Romanian Society for British and American Studies and he served as deputy director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (2005-2007). He is currently Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest and editor-in-chief of University of Bucharest Review (http://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/), a literary and cultural studies academic journal.

The People versus the People. On „Nationalism”, „Populism”, and Other Academic Myths – A Few Distinctions and a Case Study.

The talk will focus on the construction of “the people” in recent Romanian public discourse and will compare how national interest and popular representation features in the would-be “nationalist”/”populist” discourse of the governing coalition with the oppositional discourse of its spontaneous protesters in the social media and during the rallies of February 2017. While the ruling political circles in Romania employ a discursive arsenal that resembles that of other anti-EU politicians in European nations, it also has its peculiarities. In order to determine its nature, its affiliations and its special character, I will be proposing a few terminological clarifications regarding the use in the common discourse of academics and public intellectuals of such terms as “nationalism”, “populism”. My approach to the construction of national self-images is a discourse-based constructivism built on the categories of Hayden White’s typology of historiographic discourse and the imagological distinctions of François Hartog.

Nations as Social Groups or as Abstract Communities of Cultural Values?

Point of departure of my reflections is the conviction that to observe the current issue of “new nationalism” without regard to its object – the nation, means entering a vicious circle. Trying to analyze the problem in a qualified way, we have primarily to understand the nation and its changes at two interconnected levels: in the sense of a large social group of citizens, understanding themselves as a nation, asnd in the sense of an abstract cultural value-community. Even though we observe that European nation as a value community declines during last decades, the nation as social group remains strong. Where are the roots of this development? And what does it mean in the context of globalization?

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PARTICIPANTS

Raul Cârstocea

University of Flensburg, Conflict & Security Research Cluster at the European Centre for Minority Issues

Raul Cârstocea is Associate Lecturer at the University of Flensburg and Senior Research Associate in the Conflict & Security Research Cluster at the European Centre for Minority Issues, Flensburg, Germany. He holds a PhD in History from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London (UCL), with a thesis that examined the role of anti-Semitism in the ideology of the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’, Romania’s interwar fascist movement. He has worked as Teaching Fellow at UCL and held a Research Fellowship at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. His research interests focus on Jewish history, anti-Semitism, and more broadly on the history of nationalism and nation-building processes in nineteenth and twentieth century Central and Eastern Europe.

The Boundaries of ‘the People’: Populist Elements in the Ideology and Practices of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania

In the current European context that witnessed a steady increase in the importance of right wing populist and far right parties and movements, their absence in Romania appears conspicuous, all the more so since the country has a considerable nationalist legacy. During the interwar period, the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’, Romania’s native fascist movement, developed into the third largest fascist organisation in Europe (Payne 1995: 275-7; Heinen 2006: 357); the nationalist features of Romania’s communist regime after 1965 were so pronounced as to warrant Katherine Verdery’s identification of the state ideology as ‘national-communism’ (Verdery 1991). Following the collapse of communism, right-wing populist and far-right parties and movements were indeed very prominent in Romanian politics during the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, only to fade into irrelevance during the last decade. Despite this conspicuous absence, I argue in my presentation that the legacy of the interwar fascist movement remains an important political factor in Romania, as demonstrated by the intense reaction against the modification of an existing law on Holocaust denial (Law 107/2006) that explicitly included the legionary movement in the category of fascist organisations (Law 217/2015). Far from being limited to the far-right fringes of the political spectrum, the opposition to the modification of the law came from prominent, mainstream figures of the Romanian cultural and political establishment. As such, instead of having disappeared due to being definitively challenged in the second half of the 2000s (and especially following the work of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, led by Elie Wiesel, whose Final Report was published in 2005), I argue that the legacy of the legionary movement has rather been mainstreamed, with some of its more visibly extremist elements having been discarded or ‘normalised’ by a discourse that nevertheless recuperates its populist impetus and, most of all, defends the memory of interwar intellectuals with a well-known legionary past as sacrosanct.

To do so, my presentation will step back in time to analyse the specific features of populism in the ideology and practices of the legionary movement in interwar Romania. I argue that the populist elements in the legionary movement’s ideology, positing an alleged inclusiveness that was specifically aimed at obtaining the allegiance and the support of certain marginalised groups, primarily peasants and workers, backed up by a propaganda style that emphasised grassroots mobilisation, activism and voluntarism, were pivotal for the spectacular growth in popularity of the organisation. The resulting dichotomy – between an allegedly alienated political establishment serving foreign interests and the (formerly) disenfranchised, neglected and oppressed ‘masses’, seen as the authentic repositories of ‘virtue’ and ‘tradition’ – is one that is virtually omnipresent among populist movements, as analysed starting from Ionescu and Gellner’s (1969) edited volume dealing with the concept, through Margaret Canovan’s (1981) study, and finally to Ernesto Laclau’s interpretation (2005).

In addition to the theoretical approaches to populism per se, the present paper is also informed by theoretical approaches to fascism that emphasise the importance of populism within fascist ideology (e.g. Eatwell 1992; Griffin 1993), and particularly by Roger Griffin’s synthetic definition of fascism as ‘a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’ (Griffin 1993: 26).

The contemporary significance of the present paper can also be identified as transcending the Romanian case under consideration, as most of the populist elements the paper analyses are alarmingly visible among movements and parties in contemporary Europe, albeit adapted to present-day circumstances. From the distinction between an allegedly corrupt establishment and an ill-defined ‘virtuous’ ‘people’ whose boundaries are nevertheless rigid when delimited from outsiders, to an alternative style of politics meant to resonate more directly with the ‘silent majority’ that is allegedly neglected or ‘left behind’, such elements represent an important part of the new nationalisms that, all too often, draw on the legacy of past ones.

Uroš Ćemalović is Professor of Law and Public Administration at the Faculty of Law of the John Naisbitt University, Belgrade, Serbia. He received his PhD in Law from the University of Strasbourg. Uroš has thirteen years’ professional and research experience in intellectual property law, political sciences, public administration and international affairs, both in private and public sectors, with a strong focus on scientific and educational issues; he earned his Master’s degrees from both University Paris-Dauphine and University of Nancy, France, where he also attended École Nationale d’Administration, French State School for Public Administration. He served for seven years as EU Law Harmonisation Adviser at the National Assembly of Serbia; he was also an independent expert in various cross-border educational projects and legal consultant of numerous international organisations.

The Role of the Membership in the European Union and of its Legal System in the Prevention of Nationalistic Discourse: The Case of the Western Balkans

The discourse of hatred, which started in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has had disastrous consequences for all newly independent states in the Western Balkans. This was especially the case for ex-Yugoslav nations, whose co-existence in a federal state had ended with a fratricidal war, having as its main vectors the discourse of nationalistic myths, self-victimisation and revival of historical frustrations dating from the First and Second World War. All these phenomena, as well as the resulting tensions, have lately been revived in the context of a global economic and migratory crisis, creating a vague of what can be designated as a new nationalism. Moreover, the narcissism of small differences between the South-Slavic nations – who share not less than language, common historical background and more than 70 years of life in a common state – significantly contributes to the revival of the nationalistic discourse.

For at least two decades, the perspective of membership in the European Union (EU) and its attributes often nominated as ‘soft power’ or ‘force of attraction”’ have had a calming positive effect on inter-ethnic relations in the Western Balkans. However, a refurbished nationalism that is now arising in all ex-Yugoslav states often uses an openly anti-EU discourse, while the perspectives based on liberalism, integration and cosmopolitanism are undoubtedly in retreat. On the other hand, the membership in the EU (for Slovenia and Croatia) or its perspective (for all other states of the region) – as well as the impact of the EU’s legal system on the internal social and political situation – are still playing a significant role in the prevention of nationalistic sentiments and discourse.

The proposed paper would seek to go behind and beyond the analysis of purely political and legal phenomena, arguing in favour of adopting a new paradigm that would reconcile the legitimate patriotic sentiments and the active prevention of nationalism.

Arthur Depner holds a Master’s degree in European Ethnology, Philosophy and Protestant Theology at the University of Bamberg (2010). He worked as a Research Assistant and Program Manager at the Centre for Postgraduate Training and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Augsburg. Currently, he is working as a consultant for training measures in the context of the recognition of professional qualifications at Tür an Tür – Integrationsprojekte gGmbH (Augsburg, Germany).

Every Second Counts! Comedy Between Subversive Action and National Conformity

Authors: Dr Simon Goebel & Arthur Depner

The Dutch late night show ‘Zondag met Lubach’ (‘Sunday with Lubach’) broadcasted a satire video on the 22nd of January 2017 in which the makers pretend to be the government of the Netherlands addressing Donald Trump. The speaker in the video using simple-minded idioms and phrases known from speeches of Trump declares that the Netherlands accept that America is first, but applies for being second – whatever that means. In running through the Netherlands’ history by picking up embarrassing parts as well as focusing current political issues like nationalism, the video is targeting on a deconstruction of typical national self-descriptions by the official policy.

Many European and non-European late night and satire shows produced similar videos in a concerted action. They created the website everysecondcounts.eu.

Apparently, those video productions are statements against the nationalist agitation of Donald Trump and his staff just as against their rhetoric seeking for segregation and discrimination of minorities. This could be interpreted as progressive and self-deprecating media input. A more detailed view, however, allows another interpretation. Every video focuses on an exclusively national history. The self-deprecating laughter addresses ‘us’, a collective identity construed as national. All videos include traditional stereotypes and enemy images. Not least the shows stage a national competition for the funniest video.

In our paper, we analyse the videos of European shows qualitatively taking both levels of meaning (progressive self-deprecating, reproduction of stereotypes) into account to show which discourses on nationalism they contain explicitly and implicitly. Therefore, we will contextualize them with everyday discourses on nationalism and collective identity in Europe. Using a cultural anthropology approach, we ask whether the meanings of words, idioms, phrases, images and notions in the videos are a subversive action or just another media production confirming national mindsets.

We ask whether the meanings of words, idioms, phrases, images and notions in the videos are a subversive action or just another media production confirming national mindsets.

Simon Goebel holds a Master’s degree in European Ethnology, Political Science and Philosophy, and a PhD in European Ethnology at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. He is currently working as a consultant for asylum law and access to the employment market at Tür an Tür – Integrationsprojekte gGmbH in Augsburg, Germany. He is a member of the research group ‘Flight&Migration and Social Transformation Processes’ at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, as well as a member of the refugee studies network (the Netzwerk Flüchtlingsforschung) and a coordinator of the working team ‘Flight and Media’.

Every Second Counts! Comedy Between Subversive Action and National Conformity

Authors: Dr Simon Goebel & Arthur Depner

The Dutch late night show ‘Zondag met Lubach’ (‘Sunday with Lubach’) broadcasted a satire video on the 22nd of January 2017 in which the makers pretend to be the government of the Netherlands addressing Donald Trump. The speaker in the video using simple-minded idioms and phrases known from speeches of Trump declares that the Netherlands accept that America is first, but applies for being second – whatever that means. In running through the Netherlands’ history by picking up embarrassing parts as well as focusing current political issues like nationalism, the video is targeting on a deconstruction of typical national self-descriptions by the official policy.

Many European and non-European late night and satire shows produced similar videos in a concerted action. They created the website everysecondcounts.eu.

Apparently, those video productions are statements against the nationalist agitation of Donald Trump and his staff just as against their rhetoric seeking for segregation and discrimination of minorities. This could be interpreted as progressive and self-deprecating media input. A more detailed view, however, allows another interpretation. Every video focuses on an exclusively national history. The self-deprecating laughter addresses ‘us’, a collective identity construed as national. All videos include traditional stereotypes and enemy images. Not least the shows stage a national competition for the funniest video.

In our paper, we analyse the videos of European shows qualitatively taking both levels of meaning (progressive self-deprecating, reproduction of stereotypes) into account to show which discourses on nationalism they contain explicitly and implicitly. Therefore, we will contextualize them with everyday discourses on nationalism and collective identity in Europe. Using a cultural anthropology approach, we ask whether the meanings of words, idioms, phrases, images and notions in the videos are a subversive action or just another media production confirming national mindsets.

We ask whether the meanings of words, idioms, phrases, images and notions in the videos are a subversive action or just another media production confirming national mindsets.

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Bucharest, specializing in Ethnic and African American literature and Postcolonial Studies. She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest and a PhD in Postcolonial Literature from the University of East Anglia, UK. She is currently researching the area of intersection between diasporic postcolonial and postcommunist literature. Her main teaching interests are contemporary American Studies, diasporic literature in English, Romanian culture in the global age. Some of her recent publications are: Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English, Amsterdam: Rodopi; Cultura românească în perspectivă transatlantică. Interviuri (Romanian Culture in Transatlantic Perspective: Interviews), co-edited with Teodora Serban-Oprescu, Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2009; Identity Performance in Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction, Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2008.

Rhetorics of New Nationalism: The ‘Colectiv Revolution’ in the Romanian Media

On the night of October 30, 2015, a rock concert at Club Colectiv in Bucharest ended in an accidental fire that killed 60 people and left around 150 with serious injuries. The event was perceived as a national tragedy in Romania, with President Klaus Iohannis announcing three national mourning days. The local authorities were blamed for neglecting to make sure that basic safety measures were properly taken in Bucharest public indoor spaces. They were also criticized for the poor conditions in Romanian hospitals, where some of the victims died not from the burns, but from hospital-acquired infections.

This was the last straw to a growing wave of discontent with the government then in office, led by Prime Minister Victor Ponta, with a Social Democratic Party majority. In a spectacular series of street manifestations ignited by the event – the so-called ‘Colectiv Revolution’ – the government, accused of gross neglect of the needs of the people, was asked to resign, which they did a month after the disaster. The new government was one of technocrats, as President Iohannis repeatedly stressed, led by Prime Minister Dacian Cioloș, with a liberal majority. When a Social Democratic Party majority in Parliament reappeared a year later, following the elections on November 11th 2017 and reflecting the current global return to nationalism (represented in Eastern Europe by the political left wing rather than the right), an important part of the Romanian public sphere, to the extent that it exists now, felt that the Colectiv victims had been betrayed.

This paper will analyse the interactions between the rhetorical constructions of the Colectiv disaster in the Romanian print and online media and the growth of a new rhetoric of nationalism that has accompanied the return to power of the Social Democratic Party in Romania. I will position my discussion in the context of the current rise of new waves of nationalism in Europe. I will engage in a dialogue with Noemi Marin’s work on the rhetorical constructions of postcommunism (2007 and 2015) and Bogdan Ștefănescu’s rhetorical approach to nationalist discourse in a comparative postcommunist/postcolonial perspective (2012) to suggest that violent linguistic response to disaster can significantly alter existing public views on nationalism and national identity.

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Marharyta Fabrykant

Belarusian State University, Belarus; National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

Marharyta Fabrykant is a Senior Lecturer in data analysis and cross-cultural research at the Belarusian State University, Minsk, and a Research Fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Her research interests are nationalism, national identity, and national history narratives, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. She authored and co-authored three books and a number of articles, including, among the most recent ones: Fabrykant, M. and Buhr, R., 2016. Small state imperialism: the place of empire in contemporary nationalist discourse. Nations and Nationalism, 22(1); Fabrykant M., Magun V. ‘Grounded and Normative Dimensions of National Pride in Comparative Perspective’, in: Dynamics of National Identity: Media and Societal Factors of What We Are / Ed. by P. Schmidt, J. Grimm, L. Huddy, J. Seethaler. L. : Routledge, 2016.

Russian-Speaking Belarusian Nationalism: Footing the Bill of a “Costly Signal”

Ethnolinguistic identity has come to stand for an apparently indivisible core of any past-oriented nationalist discourse. The present study, however, shows how this alleged monolith can be split along the lines separating the national language from the rest of what is usually constructed as cultural heritage. It examines a case of Belarus, where the Belarusian language in less than a decade changed its role in the nationalist discourse from a shibboleth defining ‘true Belarusians’ to an obstacle to nation-building. The study focuses on the conclusions drawn by the contemporary Belarusian nationalists from the defeat of the early post-Soviet nationalist movement. The movement’s failure to gain public support got attributed to their attempts to impose Belarusian as a language of everyday use on the predominantly Russian-speaking population. The tactics of translating Belarusian nationalist propaganda into Russian marginalized the earlier romantic national-democratic version of Belarusian nationalism in favour of an ultra-pragmatic and ultra-conservative alternative. This geopolitical turn, originally prompted by the choice of the Russian language and largely inspired by the imported ideas of Russian neo-Conservatives, especially neo-Eurasianists, paradoxically turned anti-Russian. Its national history narrative presented Belarusians as a Russian-speaking part of the European civilization and contrasted them to non-European Russians. The case of Belarus shows how the ideas of the Russian world backfired by creating its opponents not solely among the proponents of modernization, but even among fellow neo-Conservatives. It also sheds a new light on the recent conservative turn in some Eastern European states towards a traditionalist notion of Europeanness in contrast to the contemporary European institutions. At a more abstract level, the study reveals some of the possible causes and consequences of a split between language and other parts of ethnolinguistic national identity.

Diego Han holds a Master’s degree in history from the ‘Juraj Dobrila’ University in Pula (Croatia). Since August 2015 he has been employed as a researcher at the Centre for Historical Research Rovinj, where he was previously a trainee from 2009 to 2014. Since 2013 he has been a collaborator of the Istrian Historical Society. His academic interests include contemporary history, nationalisms and totalitarianisms, war and peace studies, geopolicy, and human and social rights.

The Relativization of the Fascist NDH in the Contemporary Croatian Nationalism

After almost three decades since the beginning of Yugoslavia’s breakdown, the Croatian state is falling deeply into a new nationalistic narrative. Even though part of the EU, and thus actively participating in various European integration processes, the Croatian political spectre is getting rapidly swollen by nationalistic topics and discourses, while the right-wing government passively observes the gradual radicalization of the population, especially on the right. In a delicate historical context (the migration crisis, Brexit, Trump, Russia etc.), stability and security are, as it often happens, searched in the past and in this case in the legacy of the fascist puppet state called Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (NDH) existed from 1941 to 1945. This development can be particularly seen in the new meaning that many are trying to give to the fascists salute ‘Zadomspremni’ (For home ready), which is falsely claimed to be an ‘old salute used by the Croats for centuries’, and thanks to relativization of the NDH in general, which history is often ignored or dismissed. Furthermore, both the salute and the legacy of the NDH are tightly connected to the myths of the Independence war fought in the early 1990s, when the NDH ideology and symbolism has regathered importance.

Given these preconditions, the goal of this paper is to analyse how the contemporary Croatian nationalism is ‘adjusting’ the state’s history, changing facts and turning them into new truths by the relativization of its fascist past. In order to achieve that goal, an attentive examination of the current political discourse will be made and compared to the historical facts that it is supposedly based on.

Zbigniew Jazienicki is a second-year PhD candidate in the department of Polish Studies at University of Warsaw (Department of Polish Literature). His interests revolve around contemporary Polish literature (especially in the contexts of modern nationalism and sovereignty), as well as psychoanalytic theory of literature and political philosophy. His research has been published in important Polish studies journals such as. Praktyka Teoretyczna and Przegląd Humanistyczny. Currently, he is preparing a thesis which examines post-secular aspects of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s writing.

The Hanging, Negativity and the National Spirit. The Political Theology of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz

The conference presentation is dedicated to the essays of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, an author who proudly defines his works as nationalist. His latest works could be read as a diagnosis of the current political situation in Poland and, in a broader perspective, show the reasons of Central-European national awakenings. These historical essays derive their political meaning from past events, when the collapse of legality, the liminal situation of normativity makes place for a new form of national mobilization toward a more cohesive community. Borrowing the vocabulary of political philosophy, one could say that the crucial issue rearising in those theo-political essays is the state of exception, which is, by Rymkiewicz’s understanding, every historical crisis of the legal frame ensuing from the crash of an ontic structure, as a necessary condition for the emergence of ex-legal national sovereignty. That leitmotiv of manifesting ‘Polishness’ on the threshold of legality is interesting especially in the context of the modern European nationalism and its Polish variation in particular, affirmatively presented in Rymkiewicz’s works. Here, human beings, thrown into the margin of the law, reduced by the suspension of legality to bare life, are surprisingly considered as the hard core of national community formed in the fall of state and legal system in the phantom body of the sovereign. Characteristic of a state of exception logic, a structural abandonment like this becomes the ontological ground of the Polish nation. Most importantly, the essayist problematizes this crisis-driven emergence and constitution of national community in the context of affective alertness, asking about ‘moods’ generated in the state of abandonment – ‘moods’ that open to the national being-with-others (and, in its dark reverse, being-without-others stimulating practices of exclusion). Taking into account Heidegger’s works from his infamous rectorate, when in the state of exception as a sinister normality in the III Reich German philosopher grasped Volk’s attuning to being-the-nation, I will rest my method on an analogical analytical strategy, trying to grasp affectiveness in Rymkiewicz’s essay called Wieszanie (Hanging). The effects of abandonment, such as – to list them after Heidegger – desolation, boredom and emptiness, in that way appear as a ‘moody’ opening to being-Polish.

Jan Kajfosz is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Ostrava (Czech Republic) and Head of the Department of Theory and Research of the Contemporary Culture at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Silesia (Katowice, Poland). He holds a Habilitation in Ethnology (Cultural Anthropology) from the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznan, Poland) and a PhD in Polish Philology from the University of Ostrava. His research interests concern folklore studies, critical discourse analysis, methodology of qualitative research, cognitive anthropology, borderlands, pop-culture and media, critical discourse analysis, and social strategies of persuasion. Selected publications include: Językowy obraz świata w etnokulturze Śląska Cieszyńskiego (Linguistic Image of the World in the Ethnoculture of Teschen Silesia), ProPrint, Czeski Cieszyn 2001; Magia w potocznej narracji (Magic in Popular Narration), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2009.

Neoliberalism, the Rise of New Media Folklore and the Emergence of New Nationalisms

The aim of the presentation is to define the difference between nationalisms of the modern era and new nationalisms. The proposition is methodologically based on the phenomenological and semiotic analysis of texts representing genres of new media folklore (e.g. hoaxes, conspiracy theories, Internet memes) spread within digital communicative networks as well as on the analysis of conditions of their production, consumption and reproduction. The author works with the notion of folklore developed by P.G. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson. Drawing on them we can define folklore as a poetical text (cf. J. Mukařovský) aimed at la langue. Such text is broadly reproduced in many forms and versions or there is broadly reproduced its semantic structure within a communicative society e.g., a digital communication network. Folklore text seems to be an underestimated production and reproduction mean of ideology (A. Gramsci et al.).

The first question the author rises is what conditions shape the contemporary social production and reproduction of nationalisms compared to the era of modernity? There are some criteria which make the difference explicit – among them neoliberal cultural patterns and new media folklore as a sphere of collective presumption taking place beyond traditional (modern) social structures, hierarchies; beyond constraints of traditional institutions, i. a. classical (long time) authorities. The author examines two claims: firstly, the production of contemporary nationalisms often takes part beyond classical ideological state apparatuses, if to use the notion of L. Althusser. Secondly, new nationalisms conceptualize and define ‘threats’ and ‘enemies’ of the nation in different ways as modern nationalisms did. The way new nationalisms conceptualize and define ‘the Other’ is considered next. The author will provide the answer to the question, how concepts and claims relating to ‘the Other’ are legitimized within the new social networks, as well as what cognitive mechanisms, functioning under what circumstances, are responsible for these legitimization practices. The author shows attempts of proving that new nationalisms are based on the magical-mythical perception and thinking, he analyses e.g. the notion of ‘traditional Christian values’ within the genres of new media folklore.

Deborah L. Michaels is Associate Professor of Education at Grinnell College in Iowa, where she teaches courses in Comparative and International Education, History of Education, and Social Studies Teacher Education. Dr Michaels earned her PhD at the University of Michigan and her undergraduate degree at Cornell University. She studied and worked for thirteen years in Europe, primarily in Germany, Spain, and the Czech and Slovak Republics. She continues to conduct research in Central and Eastern Europe on school segregation and Romani students, Holocaust Education, and national identity in history textbooks. In the US, Dr Michaels is developing a web-based collection of history lessons that foreground Native American perspectives and, thus, challenge the standard textbook narrative. Her most recent publications, including a book co-edited with Doyle E. Stevick and published by Routledge in 2016, elucidate how schools teach the Holocaust in post-socialist Europe. Dr Michaels has received numerous grants and fellowships including a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation (2014), a US State Department Speaker Grant to Budapest, Hungary (2006), a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2006-2007), and a Fulbright Fellowship (2004-2005). In 2017, she received two Innovation Fund grants from her institution in support of her current projects, Racing Iowa and Meskwaki College Access, which focus on racial in/exclusion in US higher education.

A Comparison of Nationalist Narratives in Slovak History Textbooks (1910-1995) and Political Rhetoric (2014-2017)

In early 2016, the results of the Slovak national elections evidenced a move toward right-wing populism, mirroring ethno-nationalistic trends in other Visegrad nations, France, Britain, and the US. The radical nationalist People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) gained representation in Parliament for the first time, winning fourteen seats, while the Slovak National Party (SNS) won fifteen. This paper compares the rhetoric of populist politicians in Slovakia today to nationalist narratives observed in an analysis of over 300 Slovak-language history textbooks published between 1910-1995 for use in secondary-school classrooms. Grounded in narrative theory and comparative historical analysis, this study concludes that populist politicians in Slovakia today are drawing on at least three nationalist themes echoed in history textbooks from decades past: (1) primordial narratives of ethno-national belonging rooted in origin myths, progenitorial claims to the land, and the glorification of an imagined, bygone Golden Age of the Slovak state; (2) cultural narratives equating Slovak belonging with Christianity, while positing Muslims and Jews as moral enemies of the nation; and (3) fearful depictions of Hungarians and Germans as dominating neighbours and national infiltrators who threaten Slovakia’s independence. These three themes of rhetorical continuity contrast with a noteworthy change between ethno-nationalist narratives in history textbooks in the 20th-century and populist rhetoric in Slovakia today. While the former sources made concerted claims to Slovakia’s centrality in the geographical and imagined space of European civilization, now populist politicians are distancing themselves from that same supranational entity. Meanwhile, references to the primordial narratives in today’s Slovak political rhetoric embrace an outward-looking performativity that is non-isolationist, as they function to legitimize the Slovak nation vis a vis other nations. Yet, these primordial references also serve to mobilize the nation internally, providing a story of origin, legitimacy, and vocation around which identifying Slovak ethnic nationals are meant to rally.

Adam Mrozowicki is a sociologist. He has a habilitation in sociology from the University of Wroclaw (2016) and a PhD in Social Sciences from the Catholic University of Leuven (2009).Since 2009 he has been employed at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wroclaw. His academic interests concern the sociology of work, comparative industrial relations and critical social realism. He is currently a partner in the NCN-DFG research project PREWORK Young precarious workers in Poland and Germany: a comparative sociological study on working and living conditions, social consciousness and civic engagement.

Labour and Nationalism in Poland: Exploring the (Missing) Links

Authors: Justyna Kajta & Adam Mrozowicki

Since the last few years, we can observe growing presence and activity of nationalist organizations in Poland and elsewhere in Europe. The aim of this paper is to discuss the basis of such mobilization. The explanations of the emergence of nationalism in many European countries can broadly be grouped into two types: economic-type and cultural type. In this paper, our question is what kind of explanation suits better the Polish case. The basic dilemma addressed can be summarized into questions: is the new nationalist movement a voice of ‘disfranchised’ population reflecting the subsequent waves of precarisation? Or, perhaps, the new nationalist movement is driven predominantly by non-economic factors and sentiments and represented by a wide array of participants coming from various strata and classes and the links between the nationalist movements and labour movements remain weak? Following a brief discussion of the theoretical background and the Polish context, we discuss the results of the analysis of biographical-narrative interviews (30) with the participants of Polish nationalist movement, as well as selected results of NCN-DFG funded project PREWORK on young precarious workers in Poland and Germany. We also refer to our own research on workers and trade unions in Poland in 2002-2016 and present some evidence on the scope of cooperation between trade unions with right-wing and left-wing political organisations. The analysis of the interviews with far-right activists suggests the new nationalist movement in Poland groups various anti-liberal forces and channels their discontent in a discourse of cultural exclusion while veiling the heterogenous economic situation of its members and possible class-based demands. Economic insecurity becomes a favourable ground for such an exclusionary discourse in a context in which the forces of labour are weak and fragmented and political discourse legitimates the lack of the left-wing alternatives. However, based on our research and survey data, we cannot support the thesis about the consistent right-wing turn in the political orientations of young people in Poland. Instead, it can be concluded that the economic and political attitudes of young people remain rather ambivalent and heterogeneous, and the most typical is the rejection of politics as such. While the ‘anti-systemic’ and anti-establishment views are clearly present in the narratives collected, their far-right framing remains rather rare even in the narratives of the core activists studied.

Justyna Kajta is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wroclaw. Her research interests concern qualitative methodology, discourse analysis, social movements, nationalism, social and political transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the identity of the participants of the Polish nationalist movement.

Labour and Nationalism in Poland: Exploring the (Missing) Links

Authors: Justyna Kajta & Adam Mrozowicki

Since the last few years, we can observe growing presence and activity of nationalist organizations in Poland and elsewhere in Europe. The aim of this paper is to discuss the basis of such mobilization. The explanations of the emergence of nationalism in many European countries can broadly be grouped into two types: economic-type and cultural type. In this paper, our question is what kind of explanation suits better the Polish case. The basic dilemma addressed can be summarized into questions: is the new nationalist movement a voice of ‘disfranchised’ population reflecting the subsequent waves of precarisation? Or, perhaps, the new nationalist movement is driven predominantly by non-economic factors and sentiments and represented by a wide array of participants coming from various strata and classes and the links between the nationalist movements and labour movements remain weak? Following a brief discussion of the theoretical background and the Polish context, we discuss the results of the analysis of biographical-narrative interviews (30) with the participants of Polish nationalist movement, as well as selected results of NCN-DFG funded project PREWORK on young precarious workers in Poland and Germany. We also refer to our own research on workers and trade unions in Poland in 2002-2016 and present some evidence on the scope of cooperation between trade unions with right-wing and left-wing political organisations. The analysis of the interviews with far-right activists suggests the new nationalist movement in Poland groups various anti-liberal forces and channels their discontent in a discourse of cultural exclusion while veiling the heterogenous economic situation of its members and possible class-based demands. Economic insecurity becomes a favourable ground for such an exclusionary discourse in a context in which the forces of labour are weak and fragmented and political discourse legitimates the lack of the left-wing alternatives. However, based on our research and survey data, we cannot support the thesis about the consistent right-wing turn in the political orientations of young people in Poland. Instead, it can be concluded that the economic and political attitudes of young people remain rather ambivalent and heterogeneous, and the most typical is the rejection of politics as such. While the ‘anti-systemic’ and anti-establishment views are clearly present in the narratives collected, their far-right framing remains rather rare even in the narratives of the core activists studied.

Dr Barbara Pabjan is Faculty Member at the Institute of Sociology and the Institute of Musicology at the University of Wroclaw. She is a sociologist and cultural anthropologist with specialization is the sociology of knowledge, memory studies, sociology of culture, sociology of music, and sociology of prison. She has conducted research in the field of sociological aspects of the interpretation of the past dealing with the following issues: conflicts about the past, commemoration in public space, the influence of the elite on collective memory, the Polish-German relations in collective memory, the cognitive mechanisms of collective interpretations of the past, and the role of art (film) in collective memory formation. Her other interests include modelling social phenomena in sociophysics, sociology of science and scientific knowledge, methodology and methods in social sciences.

The Language and Socio-Cognitive Structures in Nationalistic Discourse. An Empirical Study.

There is a belief that the occurrence of conflicts in the past increases the likelihood of new conflict in the future due to socio-cognitive mechanisms which impart conflict from the past to the future (Rydgren 2007). The socio-cognitive approach which I would like to propose explains the formation of national and local identity as a socially shared knowledge. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct and analyse the socio-cognitive and linguistic framework and the mechanisms which are activated in specific social environments, namely where there is ethnic conflict. I analyse how people construe the sense of identity from the way they talk about the past and the way they interpret the collective history of the nation and the local community. Especially, I want to describe and explain the language and socio-cultural cognitive structures that form narratives of identity and nationalist discourse. The analysis is based on empirical data and examples are drawn from researching the debates in social media, and surveys.

Tamara Petrović Trifunović is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Belgrade, where she worked as a Teaching Assistant from 2010 to 2014. She was a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, from 2014 to 2016. She participated in several national and international research projects dealing with the study of political communication and media discourse. She is currently finishing her dissertation on the interplay of discourses of culture, class, and politics in the symbolic struggles of contemporary Serbian society. Her research interests lie in the fields of discourse studies, sociology of culture, sociology of social classifications and symbolic geography. She focuses on the interconnectedness of culture, discourse and inequality, and on the articulation of resistance in public discourse. She presented her research at many international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals and volumes. She co-edited three volumes, including Collective memory and the politics of remembrance (2015, in Serbian). She is a member of the European Sociological Association and the Group for Social Engagement Studies.

Symbolic Struggles in Serbian Public Discourse: Between (and Beyond) Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

During and after the dramatic period of disintegration of Yugoslavia, the polyvalent element of ‘culture’ (comprising manners, sophistication, education, ‘good taste’, but also urbanity, cosmopolitan and/or pro-European political orientation), was articulated as the important form of resistance to the nationalist politics of Milošević’s regime. Numerous studies identified cultural distinction as one of the most tenacious discursive tools in creating symbolic divisions in contemporary Serbian society (Jansen 2005, Spasić 2006; Simić 2012; Spasić and Petrović 2013, etc.). Conflicts rooted in different political orientations are intertwined with discourses on culture, constituting political cleavages and the antagonism of two cultural models (a variation on the ‘culture war’ between the ‘two Serbias’ – the ‘nationalist’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’ Serbia). The paper investigates how the complex notion of ‘culture’ can serve as a ‘multi-purpose weapon’ of symbolic struggles in public discourse (Živković 2011). This type of language of cultural evaluation and exclusion provides a mode for articulation of resistance to the established social order, however, the one which might undermine solidarity between social actors, ignoring the fact that cosmopolitan orientation and belonging are not equally available and empowering for everyone along the social structure (Calhoun 2008). On the other side, attempts to overcome this dichotomy can be used to create the hybrid discourse which functions as a tool to legitimate the new type of nationalism in the Serbian political scene. It is therefore important to shed light on the symbolic mechanisms through which socioeconomic grievances and political contestations are discursively translated into the ‘culture war’ between the First and the Other Serbia by both sides in the symbolic conflict. Rooted in van Dijk’s approach to critical discourse analysis, the elaborate study of public debates over the symbolic divisions in Serbian society was conducted on a corpus of media texts in daily newspapers and weeklies from 2001 to 2015.

Łucja Piekarska Duraj holds a Master’s degree in European Studies (2002) and a PhD in Sociology (2013) both received from the Jagiellonian University. She is currently affiliated with the Institute of European Studies at the Jagiellonian University. She is a social anthropologist, interpretive heritage trainer and cultural manager. As a researcher, she is mainly interested in relations between social memory, heritage and identity, especially in the domain of museums. As a heritage consultant, she promotes interpretive and democratic museology. She specialises in storytelling for museums and the support for brand management strategies. She has co-authored a manual for interpretive museology Lokalne muzeum w globalnym świecie/Local museum in global world (Krakow, 2013, written with Hajduk. J, Waciega S., Idziak P.) as well as a number of museum exhibitions and projects (for instance ‘dzieło-działka’, Krakow Ethnographical Museum, 2010; Wirtualne muzea Małopolski, 2009 – 2014; Muzeobranie 2004 – 2006). After a decade of museum activism, she joined the UNESCO Chair for Holocaust Education at the Jagiellonian University (2016).

Is Gdansk Worth Dying For?

The battle fought over newly opened, Gdansk located World War II Museum gives a unique insight onto the relations between political power and mythology, allowing to analyse how heritage discourse mirrors the public debate.

World War II can be seen as a major founding trauma for contemporary Poland, while the attitudes towards it reveal the dynamics of – often conflicted – collective identities and memories. The concept of the sacredness of the Past, together with ideas of heroism, patriotism or honour, are definitely the important elements of the spectacle. Not only the core questions about the right to represent and to interpret the past are posed, but the content of the story is clearly used for ongoing political debates. One of the most intriguing parts of the debate over the museum concern understanding of motherland/homeland and specifically ‘Polish State viewpoint’, with literary negotiations of duties towards one’s own country.

I would like to discuss the main axis of conflict as it is present in the media, drawing attention to the ideas of representation, contextualisation and particularity of the past as presented at the Gdansk Museum. Since the battle is ongoing, the conclusions for the seminar are still unknown, however already the current debate is worth presenting and analysing. I would like to use a methodological framework of PUDDING (Progress, Utility, Dignity, Diversity, Inclusion, Narrativity, Governance), recently developed to interpret Europeanization processes and the construction of common European heritage in order to present the complexity and the uniqueness of the case.

Robert Pyrah, of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford, is a historian specialising in post-Habsburg identity politics in East-Central Europe from 1918, with special emphasis on Austria, Poland and Ukraine. He jointly runs the research project ‚Sub-Cultures as Integrative Forces in East-Central Europe, 1900-present’, which explores phenomena that fall outside traditional nation-building projects. He was previously a CEELBAS Postdoctoral Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford (2007-2011) and a Senior Fellow at the International Cultural Centre in Krakow, Poland (2012). His publications include ‚Recontextualising East-Central European History. Nation, Culture and Minority Groups’ (2010); ‚From Borderland and Bloodlands to Heartland? Recent Western Historiography of Ukraine’ (2014) and a monograph, ‚The Burgtheater and Austrian Identity’ (2007).

Virtual New Nationalisms: Comparative Public Uses of (20th Century) History on Selected Polish and German Websites

The role of public history appears to need urgent re-examining and revision for the internet age. Today, there is a range of websites that selectively use elements of national history, to present new and partial national identities in the present, but little attention has been given to them as historical sources within the wider taxonomy of materials. Note: this is not construed as media studies; rather to enhance historians’ tools for assessing ‘new nationalist’ discourse.

The paper is based on a pilot research study, comparing up to 3 websites each from Poland (e.g. www.lwow.com.pl) and 3 from Germany (including http://www.der-deutsche-osten.de). Each site projects a version of national identity, using overlapping episodes from Polish/German 20th Century history, pivoting on territories that were lost/gained by either side due to the Stalinist redrawing of Europe after 1945.

This overlapping territorial and temporal focus offers scope for comparison. Thus, one aim will be to offer a very brief suggestive typology (this paper can only offer limited results, and will be a spur to further investigation). The other (main) aim is to suggest ways in which we can update the study and understanding of historical sources for the internet age, by turning our focus to websites.

Methodology: (1) discursive and historical analysis of content. This will first identify historical tropes, mythologies, discussions, and help define a typology of approaches to history (using Svetlana Boym’s types of nostalgia between politicized or cultural); (2) internet research, using the toolkit developed by the Oxford Internet Institute (see: http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/). To then understand how these sites, unlike ‘traditional’, offline materials, function as sources: the OII’s tools assess the relative weight, prominence and importance of these sources within the wider websphere (e.g. though link analysis, referral analysis).

Agnieszka Sadecka obtained her PhD from Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen, Germany and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India in the framework of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme ‘Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones’, coordinated by the University of Bergamo, Italy. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Exotic Others or Fellow Travellers? Representations of India in Polish Travel Writing in the Communist Era’, focussed on socialist perceptions of otherness. In 2007, she graduated in European Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and worked there as a teacher, researcher and student adviser between 2007-2012. Currently, she serves as academic coordinator for international programmes at the Centre for European Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

The narratives of Polish national identity construction often revolve around past glory, featuring various forms of nostalgia. At the same time, they use a strategy of erasing of the uncomfortable elements of multicultural past. This paper follows the cue of Marcin Kącki, who, in his reportage Białystok. Biała siła, czarna pamięć (Białystok. White Power, Black Memory, 2015), skilfully presents the unavoidable link between what is removed and repressed, and what takes its place. The growth of aggressive, xenophobic, neo-Nazi movements, and the wiping out of Białystok’s Jewish heritage, are presented as two sides of the same coin. This contemporary ‘memorylessness’ is, however, accompanied by the nationalist movement’s emphasis on celebrating history and carefully selected heroes of the past.

Two other reportages will be considered in this paper, referring to two instances of problematic remembering/forgetting: Anna Bikont’s My z Jedwabnego (2004) and Teresa Torańska’s We Are. Separations of ’68 (2008). Like Kącki, the two reporters focus on important events in Polish-Jewish relations and debates surrounding them. These are the dramatic events of the Jedwabne mass killing of Jews by their Polish neighbours, and of the communist era anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 in Poland.

The three reportages mentioned in this paper all focus on the removal – symbolic, but also physical – of the Jewish Other from the national territory, imaginary and memory. Filling this void constitutes, according to Andrzej Leder, a crucial part of the post-war construction of the new middle-class identity, characterised by the erasing or repressing of guilt, by the sinking into mythical past and by the distrust of Others. The contrast between forgetting certain aspects of the past and emphasising others thus remains a defining feature of Polish national identity narratives today.

Peer Scheepers is a Full Professor of Comparative Methodology (since 2001) in the Department of Sociology. He also serves as Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands (since 2014). He is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 2004) and a member of Academia Europaea (since 2015). He has published extensively in international journals in the domains of sociology, political science, communication science, psychology and medical science. He has successfully guided more than 30 PhD candidates in several faculties. His work has been frequently cited in relevant literature.

Changes in Nationalism Among Citizens of Western and Eastern European Countries? Empirical Findings from a Longitudinal and Cross-National Perspective

Authors: Marcel Coenders, Marcel Lubbers, Peer Scheepers

In this contribution, we set out to analyse cross-national trends in nationalism. Due to economic adversity, mass migration, increasing migrant diversity and the rise of extremist right-wing political parties in the public discourses, nationalism may have shifted over time. We build upon these previous theoretical and empirical studies and analyse how nationalism has developed over time in a large number of Western and Eastern European countries. We address the following research questions: (1) what are the cross-national trends in nationalism? (2) what are the individual and national characteristics that explain (changes in) nationalism across countries?

The availability of repeated cross-national surveys offers a unique opportunity to theoretically and empirically address the question of changing patterns of nationalism. We take advantage of high-quality data from the three modules on national identity (1995, 2003 and 2013) collected in the framework of the International Social Survey Program. In our analyses, we test for cross-cultural and over-time equivalence of measurement instruments and apply multi-level analyses to investigate the role of individual and contextual determinants of nationalism.

Sylva Reznik holds a PhD in law and linguistics from Lancaster University, United Kingdom. She was supervised by prof Ruth Wodak in linguistics and prof Sigrun Skogly in Law. Her thesis was focused on linguistic human rights and her research was funded by a grant for interdisciplinary research of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Lancaster University. Previously, she had earned an MA from the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom) in international relations – research track, and she also received degrees in Law and Linguistics from Charles University in Prague. Her research interests include critical discourse analysis, language in politics, language planning and minority rights. Currently, she is a lecturer of Law in English study programmes at Czech University of Life Sciences and she convenes a course on ‘Nationality and Minority – Critical Discourse Analysis’ at Charles University.

Migrant Languages in Czechia and Poland: Legal Dichotomies

This paper compares the laws regulating minority languages in Czechia and Poland. According to Czech legislation (Act No. 273/2001 Coll.), the official use of minority languages in contact with state authorities is reserved for national minorities who reside in the territory of Czechia ‘traditionally and for a long time’ (§§ 8-11). However, Czech law does not mention any criteria for determining which groups belong under this privileged category and there is no explicit enumeration of such groups. Polish law (Act of 6 January, 2005, Journal of Laws No. 17, item 141), does not make such differentiation. Article 2 explicitly enumerates national and ethnic minorities in Poland and lists the criteria a group has to meet to be regarded as such. One of the conditions a group must meet is that ‘its ancestors have been living in the present territory of the Republic of Poland for at least 100 years’ (Article 2, paragraphs 1 and 3).

The two particular legal systems have been chosen for comparison in this paper, because the two countries have similar modern histories and legal cultures. The aim is to respond to the following research question: Does the language of the above-mentioned laws work as a source of nationalist policy and anti-immigration discourse? The methodology and the theoretical framework employed is critical discourse analysis (CDA), and, in particular, the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). According to the principle of ‘triangulation’ in DHA (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 89), the analysed data include texts of legal documents, official information released by the Czech central government and Czech public media releases. The discursive strategies thereof are analysed: the referential strategies, by which social actors are constructed and represented as ‘in-groups and out-groups’ (Wodak, 2009: 319) and predicational strategies which ‘label these social actors’ (Wodak and Reisigl, 2003: 386).

Helge Wendt is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he is associated with the project Globalization of Knowledge. He received his PhD from the University of Mannheim, where he taught Early Modern History. His research focuses on the global history of coal, the history of Christian missions in different colonial contexts and the history and historiography of globalization. He currently works on the global history of knowledge of black coal (seventeenth to nineteenth century). Wendt published a book on the global history of colonial missions Die missionarische Gesellschaft. Mikrostrukturen einer kolonialen Globalisierug (Franz Steiner, 2011) and papers on different aspects of colonial mission history. He is a co-editor of The History of Physics in Cuba (Springer, 2014) and the editor of The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World (1500–1900) (Edition Open Access 2016). He published several papers on different aspects of colonial mission history and global history of knowledge, among others Becoming Global: Difficulties for European Historiography in Adopting Categories of Global History. Some Remarks, hg. v. Sonja Brentjes, Taner Edis und Lutz Richter-Bernburg; 1001 Distortions. How (Not) to Narrate History of Science, Medicine and Technology in Non-Western Cultures, Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag (2016).

Why „Métissage” is the Better (Non-)National Myth?

My paper proposes to apply the non-European national myth of ‘Mestizaje/Métissage’ for describing and analysing both European national histories and historiographies. The discourse (of colonial origins) of socio-cultural mixing in Brazil and Mexico, among others, is helpful to re-read knowledge production, myth building and political discourses on European nationhood. Historiography in Europe from its very early beginnings put the unified and pure nation ahead: one territory, one language, one ethnicity – and in many cases one religion or denomination. In this perspective, historical development led either to this purified unity or, as a consequence of bastardization to the peril of a former political entity.

Focusing on this traditional viewpoint, most observers would agree upon a reinforced re-nationalization in world politics. Besides some recent dynamics which seem to endorse this position, it is also observable that national(istic) processes cannot longer be separated neatly into internal and external. Rather, they indicate that the inter-national global relationships and the composition of national societies are far more complex than national mythmaking assumes/d. Métissage/Mestizaje offers a perspective to construct non-exclusive national identities. Therefore, we need to reconsider the relationship between ‘internal’ parts in the context of an entity defined as national society. Second, the relationship of those parts to the entity, that is the ties between the entity and ‘its’ parts, must be reviewed. And thirdly, the relationship of ‘parts’ of one to ‘parts’ of other national/identity unities should be re-evaluated. The mixing or blending of those parts at any historical period is considered the foundational dynamics shaping historical configurations, as social composition, legal and economic systems, political organization and structures or cultural and religious values.

Louis Wierenga received his Master’s degree from the University of Toronto. He is currently a PhD Candidate at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu. His research interests include Euroscepticism, far right and nationalist political parties, Baltic politics, East Central European politics, transnational nationalist networks, information warfare. His doctoral thesis focuses on gender narratives and the far right in the Central East Europe.

Russians, Refugees and Europeans: What Shapes the Ideology of the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia?

As populist radical right (PRR) parties further solidify their presence in Europe, new forms of nationalism are being infused into the agenda and discourse of this party family. With the increasing visibility of Europe’s version of the alt-right, the identitarian movement, boundaries between party membership and support are becoming increasingly fluid. A number of Central and Eastern European nationalists affiliated with both PRR parties and the identitarian movement have created an emerging nationalist movement known as, ‘the New Nationalism’. This movement combines the geopolitical strategy of ‘Intermarium’, a nationalist block which seeks to unite Central and Eastern Europe ‘from the Baltic to the Black Sea’, serving as a political alternative to both Brussels and Moscow with ‘ethnofuturism’ as the driving ideological principle.

Rising dissatisfaction with the European project combined with a xenophobic backlash to the refugee crisis has provided new discursive opportunities to the PRR. At the same time, uniting nationalists from Central and Eastern Europe proves to be a difficult task. In an attempt to achieve the goal of uniting Eastern European nationalists, ethnic nationalism, a shared historical experience and common ancestry are highlighted as the most important components of the New Nationalism. Thus far, the New Nationalism has been successful and, as recently as February 2017, a large nationalist parade and conference took place Estonia.

Using qualitative methodology in the form of interviews with party members and activists in the New Nationalism, this paper seeks to contribute to the study of nationalism and the PRR by shedding light on this new phenomenon and providing an understanding of specifically how the actors in this group plan on achieving their goals. This research also seeks to shed new light and an academic analysis on the New Nationalism project and the degree of participation between identitarian actors and PRR parties.